A hundred yards is a football field. Goal line to goal line, the whole thing, and then you’re standing at the far end wondering whether you just committed a crime.
That was Montgomery County, Maryland’s math. The county code said a licensed gun owner couldn’t carry “in or within 100 yards of a place of worship.” Same ring around schools. Around parks. Around libraries. Not inside them — within a hundred yards of them, in one of the densest suburban counties in the country, where you can stand on one sidewalk and be inside the shadow of a church, an elementary school, and a county library branch all at once.
So draw those circles on a map of Silver Spring. Go ahead. What’s left isn’t a gun-free zone. It’s a coloring book somebody already finished.
And here’s the part that ought to bother you whether you carry in Maryland or not: you can’t see it. There’s no line painted on the pavement a hundred yards off the back corner of a park, and you’d have to know where the park’s legal boundary sits before you could start pacing. You’re a man with a permit, walking a sidewalk that looks like every other sidewalk in America, and whether you’re a criminal depends on geometry you have no way to measure.
Then there’s the synagogue.
Silver Spring Jewish Center and Rabbi J. Menahse Shapiro sued the county. Not to score a point about the Second Amendment in the abstract. They wanted people inside their own building, during services, who could do something if somebody came through the door. That is not a hypothetical for a synagogue, and nobody has to explain the reasoning to a congregation that already understands it. They weren’t asking to open-carry a rifle down the street. They were asking to have their own licensed members standing armed in their own sanctuary while their people prayed.
On September 18, Judge Deborah Chasanow gave it to them. Partly.
That word’s doing a lot of work, because the celebration posts are already getting this wrong.
She issued a preliminary injunction — temporary by design. It protects Silver Spring Jewish Center and Rabbi Shapiro. It protects nobody else. She was asked for something broader and turned it down. The Montgomery County code is still on the books exactly as written, still enforceable against every other permit holder in the county, still drawing hundred-yard circles around every school, park, library, and house of worship that wasn’t a plaintiff in this case.
The law did not fall. One congregation got a door cut in it.
The reason it’s that narrow is the part nobody’s explaining. Their claim was “as-applied.” If you’ve never had a reason to learn that phrase, this is the counter version. A facial challenge says: this law is unconstitutional, period, everywhere, for everybody, strike it. An as-applied challenge says something much smaller: whatever this law does to other people, what it does to us, on our facts, in our building, is unconstitutional. Facial is condemning the whole building. As-applied is telling the county it can’t run its road through your kitchen.
Narrow claim, narrow ruling. That’s not a judge being stingy. That’s the machine working the way it’s built.
Her words, out of the opinion: “SSJC and Rabbi Shapiro, at this preliminary stage, have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits as to their as-applied Second Amendment claim of the Code’s firearm restrictions as to places of worship.”
“Likelihood of success on the merits” is the other phrase worth owning, because you’re going to see it in every one of these cases for the next ten years. It is not a verdict. It means a judge looked early, before the real fight, and figured these folks will probably win when it’s over — enough that it’d be unfair to make them live under the law while they wait. It’s the range officer glancing at your target and saying your zero looks close. It is not a scored target.
The case keeps going. The county gets to make its full argument. Chasanow could land somewhere else by the end of it, and even if she doesn’t, the Fourth Circuit exists.
What’s on the record now, in a federal judge’s voice, is that a county probably can’t draw a circle that big around a house of worship and call it public safety — at least not against these plaintiffs, at least not yet. That’s a real crack, and some other lawyer in some other county is reading that opinion right now with a legal pad next to him.
Worth noting: Chasanow is a Clinton appointee. Whatever’s coming in the comments about activist right-wing judges won’t fit this one.
But don’t let anybody tell you Maryland’s carry map got redrawn this week. If you hold a permit in Montgomery County and you’re not a member of Silver Spring Jewish Center, nothing about your Tuesday changed. The circles are all still there.
One congregation can post a man at its own door now. Everybody else is still doing the math on the sidewalk.
